Jesse Thistle is an assistant professor at York University in Toronto and an award-winning memoirist who wrote the top-selling Canadian book in 2020, but his success didn’t come easily. Prior to penning his celebrated emotional memoir From the Ashes, Thistle spent years struggling with issues of addiction and homelessness, a lifestyle he sees to some degree as the result of the absence of a father figure in his life. His own father was an addict and a thief who disappeared nearly 40 years ago, and no one has seen or heard from him since.

When it comes to being a father, Jelani Memory lives by a fairly simple motto: Kids are ready to have difficult conversations. He and his wife have put that idea into practice with their six kids and he’s also made it the anchor of A Kids Company About, a media company he co-founded in 2018 that focuses on developing books, podcasts and online courses rooted in helping parents better communicate with their kids about tough topics like racism, grief, gender, addiction and more.

It doesn’t really matter if you’ve seen a single episode of the 1950s sitcom Father Knows Best to understand the template for what a TV dad is supposed to be like. He works hard all day and inevitably serves as the family’s main source of some combination of three things: tough love, gentle fatherly insight or bumbling but endearing ineptitude. Jordan Shapiro is out to help break the mold.

Novelist and memoirist Joshua Mohr has managed to be a number of different men in his life. He’s been a writer, college professor, husband, father, son, addict and survivor, and he’s committed himself over the past few years to ensuring that his daughter understands exactly who he is. That effort culminated in the 2021 memoir Model Citizen, which looks back on Josh’s decades of drug and alcohol abuse in the bars and streets of San Francisco and subsequent health scares, all posited as proof to his young daughter that while he’s far from perfect, at least he’s honest.

Journalist and screenwriter Chris Jones spent 14 years as a contributing editor and writer-at-large for the men’s magazine Esquire, writing everything from celebrity profiles on George Clooney and Penelope Cruz to in-depth features on astronauts, soldiers and wild animal zookeepers. He twice won the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing for his work at the magazine, in large part because of his commitment to looking back on past events and dissecting how they happened. And what went wrong.

Dr. Michael Addis is an award-winning research psychologist and a professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. He specializes in the links between social learning and social construction of masculinity, as well as the ways men experience, express and respond to the problems in their lives.

Even before his third birthday, Chris Ballew was transfixed by music. He would sit on the floor in his parents’ Seattle-area home and listen to The Beatles’ seminal 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and not long after he was writing and performing his own songs. By the mid-90s he was fronting the Presidents of the United States of America - one of the hottest bands in rock'n'roll - and appearing regularly on MTV. But he was quietly harboring a secret: “On a gut level, I wanted out immediately.”

When Jayson Greene was in the fourth grade, his teacher gave him an assignment that most kids get at some point in grade school. The question is What do you want to be when you grow up? Jayson mentioned two goals for himself, one of which may come as a surprise for a kid in grade school. He wanted to be a writer, and a father.

Ted Bunch has spent the bulk of his adult life as an educator, activist and lecturer, focused specifically on the intersection of masculinity and violence against women. He’s also spent 18 years as the Chief Development Officer of the violence prevention organization A Call To Men, and in that time he’s become one of the nation’s leading voices on the perils of male socialization and the misperception of toxic masculinity.

Paternal dives back into the archives to share the stories of three previous guests all focused on one topic: What it’s like to raise African American kids in the United States.

When Jaed Coffin was 23 years old he had recently graduated from college, and like a lot of people in that stage of their lives, he found himself looking ... for something. What he found was an austere and single-minded life in Southeast Alaska, training to become the next big thing in the sport of roughhouse boxing, a boozy, bloody, and rugged class of amateur boxing. Coffin chronicled his rise from wide-eyed novice to eventual middleweight champion in his 2019 memoir Roughhouse Friday, which the LA Review of Books called “a beautifully crafted memoir about fathers and sons, masculinity, and the lengths we sometimes go to in order to confront our past.”

When news first broke that the Coronavirus pandemic had come to Seattle, John Richards had no idea how he could keep doing his job. More than two months later, his work has never been important. Richards is a father of two boys and the host of the “The Morning Show” on 90.3 KEXP FM, an independent radio station supported largely by its listeners, so that means John and the other DJs are free to take requests from people all over the world and play whatever they want. And the station has received more notes and music requests from listeners over the past two months than ever before in the station’s history, giving Richards and his fellow DJs a unique perspective into how people all over the world are coping with the pandemic, and which songs are helping them through.

Season 4 of Paternal opens with a conversation with Scott Cooper, a New Jersey-based single father of two with a daily glimpse into the severity of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. Scott is the Director of Professional Practice at Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, New Jersey, a hospital that has been inundated with Covid-19 patients since the virus took hold in March.

Paternal celebrates Father’s Day by looking back at some of the show’s best interviews while focusing about one thing in particular: What we think of when we think about our dads. Although that’s a topic that has come up quite a bit on the show over the first 31 episodes, certain guests over the years have offered candid insight into their relationships with their own dads, the good stuff and the bad.

Keith Gaston is a father, social worker and, just like his dad, a man born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. But the city has changed in the decades since Gaston grew up there, with a climbing unemployment rate, a declining city population and issues with gun violence and drugs that are taking a toll on some of the city’s young men. That’s where Gaston has stepped in, focused on teaching young men the skills of being a father.

Author, father and New York Times co-chief theater critic Jesse Green recently examined works by Arnold Lobell, Margaret Wise Brown, Maurice Sendak and other prominent children’s book authors and illustrators of the past 50-plus years and discovered that a host of writers of a more conservative era created the best works of their lives - and some of the most influential children’s literature of all time - while largely hiding their sexuality from the public.

Craig Scott was a sophomore at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, when two students descended on the school and unleashed what was, at the time, the deadliest high school shooting in American history. And though Scott survived by hiding under a desk in the library, the shooters killed 12 students and a teacher that day, including Scott's friends, classmates, and older sister Rachel.

How many times have mothers and fathers argued about roughhousing with young kids, or why dad is a better disciplinarian than mom? After roughly four decades working in pediatrics and child psychiatry, Dr. Kyle Pruett knows the answer: Moms and dads simply parent differently, and that’s fine for everyone involved. Including the kid.

How would you describe the feeling when you first became a parent? California businessman Mark Eckhardt never seriously thought of starting a family before the birth of his first daughter. And when she finally arrived he was overcome with joy, but also with the feeling that his entire life had been forever disrupted.

Andy Johnson has spent much of his life fixing things. As a 35-year-old farmer growing corn and hay in Colorado, Johnson is a model of resourcefulness, spending the days on his 1,000 acres of farmland as an agronomist, a car mechanic, or a welder. Every year the summer storms come and go, crops thrive and die. But his farmer’s ingenuity has always persisted through the seasons, a trait passed down through five generations of men making their living off the land.